Importance of Drawing in Early Childhood
“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known”
–Oscar Wilde
Paul Klee has once said, “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk”. But that walk leads a child in to a new world of imagination and also helps in his overall development. A child expresses his emotions sometimes through diagrams. A child takes time to explain things in words but easily draws shapes and explains it. A child’s pictures talks aloud his mind and character. Thus drawing is not just an activity but an art that paints your life more colorful.
Let’s see how drawing helps a child in different ways:
- Drawing helps children in the development of fine motor skills by training kids adjust their finger grip and hand movements.
- Drawing thus helps in the hand eye coordination of a child.
- Drawing serves as a medium of communication. Children who are in their basic level of language development sometimes find the medium of drawing diagrams more easily to communicate something that they have in mind.
- Kids express their feelings through pictures and diagrams.
- A teacher or care taker or even the parents can analyse the personality, nature and tastes of a child through the picture he draws. The colours the child like, the games they love to play, the people whom they adore etc are often visible in the pictures kids draw.
- Drawings of kids not just reveal the interests of the kids but it also helps understand a child’s emotional state.
- Being able to express the emotions through drawing in turn also helps in improving and inspiring a child’s emotional intelligence.
- Drawing enhances the imagination capability and also encourages the children to analyse things visually.
- Children might get distracted easily in between reading and writing but they don’t lose focus that easily while they learn things through drawing. In fact, ability to focus is been developed in kids through drawing.
- Drawing is an easy method of learning that helps you to remember things easily and for longer time. It’s essentially because drawing makes a person process the respective information in multiple ways – visually, kinaesthetically and semantically.
- Drawing from early childhood years might kindle an interest for art and if there’s a hidden talent of art in the child, this will serve as the foundation for the child to start his journey to be an artist.
- Drawing which started with a dot and proceeded to a line later becomes a skill possessed by the child and a world to escape. Thus it boosts individual confidence of the child and gives him a hobby.
- Drawing teaches a child to solve problems creatively.
Let’s see how drawing helps a child in different ways:
Children might draw on the walls and every book and paper might be considered as canvas by them. Please don’t stop them and don’t take away their pens and colours. You can discipline them and advise them not to draw on walls if it’s inconvenient but always encourage them to draw. It gives your child a resort to escape in future from the chaos of his/her life. It will introduce art in them. It will develop their fine motor skills. It arouses imagination in them which further leads to thoughts. Let them paint their colours and try to be their canvas.
See Also: Cognitive Development in Kids